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Facebook plans UK expansion

by on21 January 2020


Wants to hire more than a thousand

Facebook will hire 1,000 people in London this year in roles such as product development and safety as it continues to grow its biggest engineering centre outside the United States after Britain leaves the European Union.

Facebook’s vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa Nicola Mendelsohn said more than half of the new jobs will be in technology, including software engineering and data science, Other roles will be in the “community integrity” team, which makes products to detect and remove harmful content from platforms like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Mendelsohn said London’s appeal was not only in its technology ecosystem but the strength of its creative industries.

She said that while Facebook’s enthusiasm for London was undimmed, like other tech companies it wanted certainty about Brexit.

"The Johnson government has been very clear about what that looks like, and so we will continue to invest here in London”, she said.

Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg will announce the new jobs, which will take its total UK employees to more than 4,000, on Tuesday before travelling to the World Economic Forum in Davos with Mendelsohn, where they will meet global leaders, regulators and other business chiefs.

The company is trying to rebuild trust in its platforms after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, in which a British political consulting firm collected data from Facebook for voter profiling and targeting.

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s public affairs chief and a former British politician, said on Monday that the company will do a better job of preventing bad actors from manipulating this year’s US presidential election than it did four years ago.

 

Last modified on 21 January 2020
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